The Spider
by Villettess
Summary: A wounded Matthew remembers.


There was a scratch. Just one. Barbed wire in singeing flesh the length of his arm band. Then the scratch turned vicious, shooting across the gash on all sides, then the hardness of the hot-cold as liquid pain seeped in and out. In and out.

But there was something else, a creeping in. He tried to push them away, these intruders. The spirals of pain had now consumed his body like peppered cuts, pulsing on the surface then radiating within. The stream prickled him, made him wince. He shook his head, willing these creatures to go away, to crawl back to their lair, their earthly palaces of sand and doom.

His hands were leaden and he couldn't will them to move. It was as if only their stumps remained, as if they have been torn from the rest of his body while he had lain numb and unconscious. He turned his head, but it felt like a wrench had seized him, spun him like a crane displacing the piles of molten bricks. The lava of pain had spread to his body, coursing through his neck, back, his knees and legs, which he had managed to shift, even though they seemed sewn in his trousers, the skin peeling like fly paper. And even though his eyes—one twitching—surveyed the scene of carnage, the listless bodies, the fallen trees, the clouds of smoke, the fumes of death, it was a haze, as if he was in no man's land, looking at something the curtain fell on.

The sight of its legs, glistening like pale needles, made him lurch. The shape raven-black he felt each hair standing on his back, each movement of the footpad as it crossed the dust. He couldn't—wouldn't—see its face. He wanted to push it away with his hand. Its grotesqueness was nauseating.

It stopped, briefly, and continued to crawl towards him. As the last rays of the light, unmarred by the darkening cloud, fell on it, he caught the faint threads of its trap, the silken footsteps of its need.

Why it stood still he could not comprehend, but the more he looked, he was no longer afraid.

_A noiseless patient spider_

It was in that book of Whitman's poems she had shared with him the day he had returned, just in time for the concert at Downton. But that was after, not before.

He remembered the shade of green that framed her, the first time he was there. It was a changeable sort, and not entirely due to the lamps that cast their game of shadows in the room. The tentacles of the pattern of gold thread shimmered, having a life of their own with each sway of her movements—when she walked to take her place at dinner, when she turned to talk to her sister, when she brought the wine glass to her lips. The emeralds in her earrings illuminated her face while the style of her dark hair outlined its contours. Maybe he had imagined a drop of scarlet on her black velvet gloves. The onyx chain at her throat revealed the angles of her collarbone, the swell of its soft mounds, the edges that were concealed by the net of her dress. When she looked at him, it was such a glance, a piercing sort that robbed him of control, surety, strength, so he had to fight for composure. So much that he heard himself sounding austere, curt, hard even.

"You'll soon get used to the way things are done here," she had said her voice haughty, her stare sharpened. It felt to him like she was far away and yet like they were the only two people in the room, everyone else reduced to mere silhouettes.

He couldn't feel the sting. The bitter taste. He was on thin air. He turned to look back, as the thick canvas of the stretcher marked his wounds, red paint sprayed like a field of poppies.

And it stood. Watching still, as the sandstorm began to shift.

It was the nearness of her. In all that commotion, as he helped steady Carson, it was her touch that burned. Agitated, she was quick to assist, her hands gently leading under Sybil's careful instructions. As they lifted Carson, their heads had drawn together, the loose strands of hair freed from the traps of her jeweled headband brushed the corner of his cheek, and there was a fragrance he couldn't forget. That scent of rosewater and regret.

Apart once more, he felt the handle of the tea cup, cold steel amidst the warm fires within. A pervasive stillness suffused the room and the edges blurred, even Lavinia who stood by his side in the opposite corner of the room. But not her. He couldn't tell if the beads on her dress traced wings or horns, fairy or foe. The shades of silver glinted, bound by the ropes of fine black thread, glistening like ripples of shrapnel in the midnight pool, fireworks in the storm . He traced the pattern through the softness of the satin that clung to her like skin, traced it as it enveloped her frame, curved around the sides but just halfway, like cascades of butterfly wings. Except where they met, the fulcrum that fixed, the point of no return. There was a lustrous darkness there, a spot not easily blotted. And it sent filament after filament, of memory and desire, tenuous threads connecting the inescapable past and the undreamt present, the coils unreeling, inviting him back to where it was whole.

_Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul._


End file.
